What&#39;s Your e-Tribe?

Peter
Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is an Emmy
Award-winning composer, NY Times best-selling author and noted
philanthropist. Currently, he is releasing socially-conscious music and
touring his "Concert & Conversation" series in support of his bookLife Is What You Make It.

If you’ve been following along, you’d know that I was at a
loss for words last week so I posted a beautifully written letter from Martin
Ping.

I’m still at a loss, but my Midwestern roots are deep and
they call out to me (in a sort of pestering obligatory way) to come through
with my weekly commitment.

I think a lot about what to write and it’s amazing how easy
it is for me to get paralyzed when I consider how little I know regarding just
about any given subject. Or when I read
how many ways people can look at just about any given subject.

There are a lot of brilliant thinkers out there (and maybe
some not so), and a ridiculous amount of (I’m pretty sure I mean that in a
good way) passionate people. Factions are many and deep.

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For instance, it’s amazing to me how these little graphics
get immediately created to display a political opinion or a philosophical
stance. It’s like we all have a little desktop ad agency to sell our point of
view or we just copy and paste something that says it better than we could
have. Here’s an example.

Which brings me back to my struggle with something to say.
There are so many people saying so many things; crazy numbers of online
communities within communities. I can’t imagine what this will develop into, but it seems impossible to imagine people staying circled around old
institutions for much longer.

It’s almost as if we can break up into smaller communities
again; like-minded people finding each other and splitting off into tribes that
may be partly virtual and partly “real life.”
And then tribes start intersecting with other tribes in surprising ways.

Social interactions on the internet have begun to create a
massive multi-dimensional enneagram (of course, this is what the advertising industry lives for tracking your
every move so you can be selectively but predictably sold to).

People are starting to gather around deeply personal and
unique aspects of themselves, and because of their sheer number and the ease
of personal expression, the internet is providing a much more nuanced look at
behavior and true ideology.

So, I’m trying to imagine how people would govern themselves
if they converged around defining characteristics other than political parties
and nation-states, religious ideology, and moral certitude–the list goes on–not because these things would disappear so much as they would get so granular
that other qualities would emerge and reveal whole new layers of overlap in a
sort of “camaraderie of values” between
people and communities.

While in some ways the world seems to be turning into a
caricature of itself (everything seems just a little bit over-sized and out of
whack–like a cartoon that maybe isn’t so funny) at the same time, we’re
meeting each other as individuals across artificial boundaries like never
before. Our world is becoming a very granular place. How will we take care of
each other and ourselves when we can see everyone’s faces–and a little of
each other’s lives?

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Who has more knowledge or a stronger opinion or a better way
to say this than I do? There’s probably a whole school of thought around this
and I just don’t know the name of it. Help me out here.